Description

Speakers:

Adrian Garces, IMEC Supplier Scouting Coordinator.

Jeanne Perron, IMEC Technical Specialist

My passion is seeing manufacturing happen successfully. After over 35 years in materials in industrial manufacturing, I have been privileged to improve supply chains associated with chillers, temperature control units, paint dispensing and mixing equipment, gear boxes, machined & fabricated parts, and conveyors for power plants, candy, and pellets. This involved countless on-site visits and audits of suppliers of every kind of product to support these finished goods.

The processes I have worked with included machining & fabrication (plastics, steel, stainless, aluminum), injection molding, thermo-molding, pressure molding, vacuum/pressure molding, rotational molding, textiles, wood processing, outside processes that included chrome, oxide, heat treat, and finally, assembly of BOM’s that had from 1 to 2,000 parts.

Each of the organizations I worked for not only had supply chain issues but ERP & lean challenges to be solved. After all of this, I’ve learned that continuous improvement is a team sport, and it becomes exponentially more difficult to work within multi-business unit projects. Bringing people together and getting them to work together is a critical skill that I have mastered while conducting multi business unit negotiations and project implementations. Patience, reinforcement, sustainment, cooperation, and collaboration were some of the more difficult challenges that I have learned to overcome.

Lastly, maximizing supplier resources to make improvements within the companies that I worked for included bringing suppliers under roof to improve quality, pricing, and product flow. These included powder paint and tooling suppliers.